About Ellen Foley

Ellen Foley, a prizewinning journalist, author, and marketing executive, focuses on organizations that need one-on-one attention, quick strategies for thought leadership, crisis communications, media relations, and employee engagement.

Ellen’s practice differs from others because of her many years of experience in higher education, health care, media, and financial services. She currently teaches journalism at Edgewood College.

Key projects include branding, corporate narrative development, compelling storytelling for individuals and organizations, media relations and training, web content creation, and social media and digital advertising planning.

She works on-site and virtually at her office.

Ellen worked as Senior Vice President of Corporate Communications at WPS Health Solutions in Madison, WI from 2013 to 2017. She led prize-winning teams in communications and marketing in addition to supervising corporate events, community relations, media relations, and the company’s philanthropic efforts. She served as Vice President of the WPS Charitable Foundation Board.

In her tenure at WPS, Ellen emphasized the company’s new efforts to create transparency in internal and external communications. She led the award-winning WPS brand refresh in 2015 and the recently honored Values Project with wall to floor graphics, installations, TV monitors, and divisional training materials.

For 30 years, Ellen worked as a reporter and editor in daily journalism. Her efforts as editor-in-chief at the Wisconsin State Journal earned the journalists there many awards for online and print projects, including a Pulitzer Prize finalist honor in 2008.

In her first job outside of publishing from 2008 to 2011, Ellen took the post of executive director of communications and community development at Madison Area Technical College. There she led the successful effort to win a $134 million referendum in November 2010.

In 1988, Ellen founded the Violence Against Women Coalition in Minneapolis-St. Paul, after the tragic murder of her sister, Mary. The coalition successfully advocated for a legislative change of the penalties for sexual predators.

Ellen volunteers as a director at the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Before joining WPS, Ellen worked as the digital communications leader for Rippe Keane Marketing, a marketing agency in Madison, Wi., and as president of Ellen Foley Ink, formerly known as Foley Media Group, beginning in 2008. Her expertise as a social media and digital marketing executive is chronicled in the book, “Social Works.”

Ellen has held editing and reporting positions in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Milwaukee, Detroit, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. She earned a master’s in journalism and a bachelor’s degree in political science, both at UW-Madison.

Ellen Foley, Panelist on “For The Record”